Innovate to Empower Dalits and Farmers:Ravi Shankar Parsad

By Tricitynews Reporter

Chandigarh 25^th October:- Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Parsad said that the mission of Digital India is to empower common man in the country.

Unveiling the Incubation Facility of STPI Mohali at the JW Marriott, the Union Minister embarked hat digital India is for the poor and underprivileged in the society and directed STPI Mohali to provide special facilities to promote entrepreneurship amongst dalit youth.

On the request of the Union Minister for Food Processing Industry Harsimrat Kaur Badal, to make STPI Moali to innovate IT solutions for the farmers, Ravi Shankar Parsad endorsed the idea and assured that STPI Mohali would become the Centre for Innovation for the Farmers too, and should become a beacon of Digital India.

Listing out the growth in diverse areas of country’s economy on the digital front, the union minister commended STPI for helping the IT industry grow and create newer employment opportunities, reaching 3 lakh crores in software exports out of which Rs. 3 lakh crores is being generated from the Tier II cities.

Digital India, Startup India, Standup India are the programmes that are transforming our country and empowering the people having reached phenomenal growth  reaching 103 crore mobile phones, issuing 105 crores adhaar cards, 40 crores broadband connections expected to reach 50 crores by next year, and 27 crores  smart phones, he added.

STPI shall very soon be laying the foundation stone of its next centre in Amritsar to help the smaller cities become part of the digital India movement. He hoped that the country which had very few mobile phone manufacturing units has attracted fresh FDI and there are over 40 such manufacturing units in the country, and hoped that manufacturing facility for mobiles would come up in Punjab too.

Union Minister for Food Processing Industry  Harsimrat Kaur Badal, said that opening of this incubation facility for startups in Mohali is a historic event, and the infrastructure facilities to promote education, health, transportation, etc. in the State is changing the face of Punjab.

Punjab is an agrarian state, she said, and requires the innovative IT solutions to help the farmers cope up with the vagaries of Nature and reduce their dependence on weather.

Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, Vijay Sampla, said that Punjab has largest number of scheduled castes and tribes who need to be empowered and STPI can contribute immensely.

Earlier in the day Union Minister Ravi Shankar Parsad along with Vijay Sampla, and Adaish Partap Singh Kairon, inaugurated a state-of-the-art incubation facility of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), at Mohali and inspected the data centre and other facilities.

The largest incubation facility for the startups amongst the Tier-II cities, and the only with such a big data centre in the country, would ramp up the region’s march towards one of the most favored IT destination in the country.

Spread over nearly 1.40 lakh square feet of built-up space, the incubation facility would go a long way in encouraging new IT/ITES entrepreneurs and startups to make it a hub for entrepreneurship. This would provide a major boost to the IT companies in Punjab to enable them to host their software applications and data, securely and safely at a fraction of the cost, instead of their own dedicated data centre. The building also houses Network Operation Centre equipped with infrastructure to ensure networking services, firewalls, servers, routers, and 100% redundant bandwidth for the users in the building.

The incubation facility has a dedicated Tier-III standard world-class data centre of 160 rack capacity available to startups to use it for big data analytics and software as a service, informed Dr Omkar Rai, Director General of STPI, he informed.

Over 60,000 sqft area from third to the sixth floors provides warm shells and 100-seats Plug-and-Play modular office space for the startups to operationalize their businesses within hours.

The top floor houses common facilities including a 100-seats auditorium, cafeteria, board rooms and meeting halls.

The facility compliments the startup ecosystem that STPI had been encouraging in the region and intends to create robust and active partnership amongst academia, research institutions, industry, professional bodies, investors and financial institutions, to help the startups grow.

Dr Omkar Rai informed that the Incubation Facility is the only building in the region which is expected to get 5-star rating as the Green Building by GRIHA, and the Ministry of Environment has already recognized STPI Mohali with an award for “Exemplary Demonstration of Energy Management.

Rajneesh Agarwal, Director, STPI Mohali said that the incubation facility has many unique features and is perhaps the first smart-building with automated controls for temperature, lighting, power consumption monitoring, uninterrupted power supply for 24x7 operations, and precision air-conditioning.